How to Sell Your Boss on Content Marketing

Successful digital marketing is all about content. Content is what drives prospects to your website, and delivers the value that converts those visitors into paying customers. Content also plays a critically important role in determining the quality of the inbound links to your site that are absolutely vital to top search engine rankings. To put it another way, your digital marketing is only as good as your content.

Aside from your company’s website, there is absolutely nothing more important to the success of your marketing efforts than creating and marketing high quality relevant content. All the SEO hacks, social media networking, and positive online reviews in the world can’t compensate for the lack of great content and this is the point that you need to make with your boss.

The Problem with Your BossChances are, the person who controls the purse strings in your company is more familiar with old school marketing, and may not understand the critical role that content plays in today’s digital marketing environment. For these marketing traditionalists, newspaper ads and radio commercials are more easily understood than the value of “writing little articles” for the Internet.

Even those managers who are more comfortable with digital marketing may be hung up on brighter and shinier objects such as social media or PPC marketing. Important as these channels are to your overall marketing success, they are simply not able to do the job without the solid foundation that content marketing provides.

Start with EducationBring your boss up to speed in terms of how important content is to your company’s overall marketing effort. In the words of Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, “What we really need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today’s consumers, a mindset shift from ‘telling and selling’ to building relationships.” The key to building those relationships can be found in effective content marketing.

An effective content marketing program can increase website traffic as well as generate highly targeted sales leads. Company blogs featuring useful or entertaining relevant content can help drive up to 55 percent more website visitors, increase search rank-building inbound links by 97 percent, and boost the number of pages indexed by the search engines by 434 percent.

Content marketing is measurable. Through affordable analytic tracking software, you can measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

Content marketing can help position your company as the “expert” in your particular field or niche. This generates trust and credibility in the eyes of your prospective customers, adding an extra degree of value to your sales efforts. Given a choice, who wouldn’t prefer to do business with the industry expert?

Content is a long-term promotional asset. Long after a newspaper ad or radio commercial has been forgotten, your content will still be around to stimulate website traffic and generate leads.

Suggest a Limited-run Pilot ProgramStart with one well-targeted, quality piece of content. Be sure to set up tracking analytics such as Google Analytics to measure the results of your efforts. You need to be able to demonstrate the effect of your content marketing efforts on visitor traffic, engagement, and conversions. Don’t forget to include social media posting and tracking wherever possible.